I wonder if Denis ran all this past PVL before acting. Surely if I was PVL I would be spewing chips at Denis?
Unless he counts Denis as an Ally or something?
It's entirely possible. If you look at how PVL runs the comp, it becomes pretty clear that his main priority is keeping the broadcasters and the first grade clubs happy. If the broadcasters are happy, the money keeps rolling, which funds the annual grant to franchise owners, which means they don't have to kick in their own cash. Everyone with any real power is thus content, PVL keeps his job and News Corp write him up like he's a genius.
Look at Las Vegas. This is a case of the NRL using its own money to lay on bonus content for the broadcasters and simultaneously give a big fat junket to cronies in the media, sponsors and others who are in some way important for the comp to keep on side. If the money to pay for that means
the NRL underfunding, say, grassroots football in Queensland, well, those under 9s don't pony up millions in sponsorship dollars or decide whether this weeks coverage is going to be complimentary or critical of the NRL. Vegas, baby!
What that all means is that PVL has no incentive at all to rock the boat with submissive club management - unless it gets to the point where other clubs or the broadcasters care about it. Obviously some clubs are closer to the inner circle - ones owned by car sales billionaires, for instance - but if others are supine and hopeless, well, why would PVL care about that?
If the clowns in charge of the Tigers couldn't run a chook raffle and are obsessed with bringing back the Magpies, V'Landys cares about exactly one of those things: making sure the Magpies obsession doesn't make the aforementioned clowns start making waves. And, to be clear, making sure the Wests Tigers are perennially uncompetitive on the field categorically does not qualify as that. As I've said before, someone has to play the Knights mid-afternoon on Saturday in the undercard for the real teams.
I suspect the upshot of this will be absolutely no more than a few more box seats and VIP treatment at the Everest for the HBG directors and V'Landys suggesting they maybe tone it down a bit with the Magpies stuff.
Tl;dr: until someone comes in and buys the licence off HBG this isn't going to change. No external agent is going to come in and force HBG to run the joint professionally.
